I recently went through an pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff.

First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is working and what’s not. When starting from scratch, it can be difficult to evaluate the words and phrases you will need. If there are other business in the same space you can examine what they are doing, but in this case a head-to-head competitor didn’t really exist.

So I started reading through the companies marketing materials, technical papers, et cetera, making a list of industry specific phrases. Then I took that list and began googling each phrase to see which ones returned results for businesses in a similar vein. The problem was virtually none of the phrases I was working with were getting my anything but research papers of .edu sites (can you hear the crickets?).

So what’s the problem, you say??

People research before they buy, getting more and more specific with their searches as they become more educated to the jargon of the industry and the desirable features and functions of the items they are researching.  Anyone searching on these phrases will quickly find this company and be set - right? 

I don’t think so, if prospects are googling and not finding what they are looking for, they alter their search.  To use a “bricks and mortar” analogy, this is why restaurants successfully locate next to other restaurants, car dealers reside next to other car dealers and so on. 

Like the bricks and mortar world, when people are searching the internet for goods and services you want be where the traffic is. However, you need to be near the right kind of traffic. You don’t want to locate your paint store next to a research institute. If you cater to the home owner, your paint store would be better off near a Home Depot, or if you cater to contractors, in an industrial area where where contractors go for building materials.

And yes, you do need to educate buyers and incorporate technical content and jargon into the content of your site, but if your selling paint, I wouldn’t create the structure of site around the petrochemical phrases used to produce it.

When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?

It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.

I am always surprised when I find businesses measuring Ad effectiveness based on click-thru rate. CTR is a simple measurement of clicks given as a percentage of impressions. That is, for a given volume of ad impressions, some number of readers have clicked-thru to your site. Unfortunately CTR can be very misleading. If you create a gee-wiz ad (such as click here to WIN), you can make your CTR soar, but if 100% of those clicks bounce, or otherwise don’t go past your landing page, you have wasted your money. What is needed is some kind of conversion or success metric to indicate that a positive step has been taken beyond just clicking the ad.

Conversion tracking is offered within Google’s, Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s the Ad interface. To track conversions, a code snip-it is placed on a confirmation page and information, like total purchase amount, can be captured. For a eCommerce site this provides straightforward business case as it is easy to understand that paying $1.00 for a click that result in a sale that nets $2.00 is a good investment.

If you don’t sell on-line, you can measure demo requests, requests for information, or file downloads as conversions. For service businesses, if the prospect selects your Contact page, where your street address, phone number, or email link are displayed you have established a clear ‘buying signal’.

I highly recommend turning on conversion tracking and installing the conversion code for every search engine you work with. Once this is enabled, you will have an additional column in your ad account showing ‘conversions’. Use conversions to help you tune the wording in your ads and to see which keyword phrases are producing the best results. One note, if you rely on a Contact page as a success metric, be sure to remove address, phone number, email contact, etc. from other pages on your site or your conversion rates will be skewed low.

There is also a conversion measure is also available in Google Analytics called Goals. Google Analytics Goals lets you identify a single page visit as a goal or visits to a series of pages can trigger a Goal. Setting ‘Goals’ helps you identify your most fertile source of leads and tune your advertising budget accordingly.